(This is a repurposed blog post) *
A SHORT REVIEW SESSION
I’ve written previously about sexual aggression and sexual predation and how they are gendered as expected male behaviors. About the image our culture holds of sex in the teenage years as something boys try to do things to girls, who consent or don’t consent and often get pressured into it anyway.
I’ve written about becoming a teenager and hearing girls complain that boys are only after one thing, saying that boys who make passes at girls are disrespectful and that it means they don’t value her as a person. I’ve written about the notion that girls want an ongoing relationship, to have a boyfriend, whereas boys want to “fuck and run”.
I’ve talked about how identifying with the girls —seeing them as my main friends and potential friends — meant needing things to be equal, needing to be wanted, whether we’re talking about being invited to someone’s skating party or invited into someone’s pants, that a certain degree of pride requires that it feels mutual. There’s a sort of polyamorous polymorphous thing that may happen when girls are the people you want as friends and also the people you want as lovers: wanting them as colleagues, as friends, as people-like-me to hang out with, and also as hot cute delicious people for whom you feel sexual appetite. As opposed to the notion of treating people different from the beginning based on whether you think of them in the friend zone or as dating potential.
I’ve written about how gay people (gay guys and lesbians alike) are mostly free, in a revolutionary way, from this gender-polarized thing, but that if you’re a femmy male and your attraction is towards female-bodied people you have to negotiate your way out of that trap, and that the perceptions of you as male and the expectations accompanying that will all be set against you.
A COUPLE DISTINCTIONS I WANT TO MAKE
I write about being a male femme, feminine male, sissy male, male girl, male woman, etc…
There are plenty of male people who dress, behave, and/or identify as femme or feminine or women, for whom the relative absence of sexual aggressive tendencies is not a defining characteristic of their femininity. That is, they may be no less inclined to make overt passes at people than males in general tend to be.
There’s also a difference between overtly taking the initiative at the communications level—expressing sexual interest in someone in such a way that they realize they’ve been asked if they want to have sex—and being a sexual top, the more actively aggressive sex partner once the activity begins. There are male people who identify as femme (etc) who are quite forward about offering the opportunity to experience them sexually, but who are not at all toppy or dominant or physically aggressive, and other male femmy people who are sexually assertive pleasure-givers and pleasure-takers who strongly prefer to be approached and asked, and yet other male feminine folks who are both or neither of those things.
There are also plenty of feminine people of any sex who aren’t hesitant to ask someone on a date if the other person hasn’t done so yet. But there’s nearly always been some flirting beforehand, so this doesn’t obviate the relevance of flirting.
This blog entry is specifically about the process of establishing that yes, you and the other person are indeed interested in maybe having sex with each other. Not about “inviting someone to spend time together” or doing specific things once you’re naked in bed together. For me it’s a central way in which I don’t seem to conform to the gender expectations for male-bodied persons, and because flirting and courting and dating and all that are scripted and choreographed behaviors, with gendered expectations and interpretations at all points, this is about doing that differently, not in the prescribed sexually aggressive masculine style but as a femme.
THE CO-REACTIVE DANCE
This isn’t about sitting there passively like the proverbial bump on a log and waiting for a cute cavewoman to bop you on the head and drag you off to her lair to have her way with you. This is about interacting and negotiating without being the sexual aggressor as mandated in the orthodox social guidelines to How To Be a Guy. There’s a bridge and you want to meet up with the women who fascinate you, somewhere in the middle, coming together, and you can move in her direction and yet still decline to go farther than 49% of the distance across it.
So, yes, this involves having behaviors. Not just the absence of behaviors.
That may sound really basic, insultingly so, even, but no one taught me how to flirt, and it wasn’t at all obvious to me as a teenager and young adult how to indicate sexual interest without doing so overtly, so basics it is.
Let’s talk about “overt”. Overt is when sexual interest has been expressed clearly enough that the other person realizes they’ve been asked if they want to have sex. It puts them in the position of consenting or agreeing or else saying no to it, and as for you, it gives you no plausible deniability. You’ve made a pass.
And let’s talk about being a nuisance: making an overt pass is not identical to making a nuisance of yourself. This blog entry is about not doing it overtly, but I’m not saying everyone who makes an overt expression of sexual interest is being annoying, only that it’s a modality that doesn’t mesh well with everyone’s style, and that happens to be true for me. More to the point, though, you can make a nuisance of yourself without making an overt pass, and it’s important to realize that not being overt doesn’t get you off the hook for being annoying. Oh yeah, it’s definitely possible to do that. If you’re sending signals and dropping hints, none of which go beyond plausible deniability, but you keep expressing that, that can get really annoying. It can be worse than making a blatant pass at someone. I know, because I’ve been on the receiving end of it and it can be seriously skin-crawlingly creepy.
Non-overt doesn’t equal absence of being sexually aggressive.
The model I like to use is what I call the “co-reactive dance”. You may initiate this with a non-overt behavior to signal some interest; then, having done so, you take the attitude that “it’s your turn” and you wait for a sign of reciprocity. If you’ve done it right, what you’ve conveyed to her is “he might be”. If she hasn’t tended to think of you in that way, she may miss it. And that’s OK. We haven’t done anything intrusive. If she has, now the ball is in her court and it’s her serve.
STEALING FROM THE MIRROR
Details, details, what the heck are these mysterious non-overt behaviors and signals? Yeah, I know, as I said, no one ever taught me how to flirt. There may or may not be good models on TV and in movies of suave sophisticated debonaire males but when you identify with women and girls all your life you’d be less likely to model yourself on those, even if they’re out there to be learned from.
Me, I turned to the source from which I learned so much else: I watched how the girls and women did it. And if you’ve spent a lifetime being girl-identified you’ll realize pretty quickly that you’re aware of the repertoire; like the decision to acquire and put on a skirt, deciding to speak these languages involves breaking a little barrier, risking being a clown, risking looking quite ridiculous**. Use that bit of worry to your advantage: go subtle.
Eye contact, and how you use it. You can express a lot in how you look at someone, and how you look away from someone. There is openness and interest that you want your eyes to speak of, but also a tentative quality, hesitancy, something inherent in the asking of a question, because you’re asking a question here. Hair is expressive, if you have it. You can choose where it falls, how it moves. If you have long hair you’re probably already aware that women like long hair on males and like to look at it and ideally want to touch it. You can touch your own, reposition it, fiddle with it. Your hands, of course, are expressive. People watch hands. The very act of touching anything conveys the act of touch, and you can do it expressively. Then there’s the body overall. People contemplating sex with someone may not be making their evaluations primarily on the basis of how hot and cute one’s body is, but it’s rarely a nonfactor; more to the point, inviting someone to survey the territory gets the other person in the more immediate frame of mind of imagining what it would be like, and conveys that you’re thinking of such things; there are ways of presenting your own body that seem to invite a scan, an assessment.
All of this gets coupled with checking for reactions, watching to see if she’s taking it in.
So all this is stolen from the girl-repertoire of flirting and we’re mirroring it back, speaking this language as male-bodied people. Does it work on women? Well, first and foremost, it’s a language, and it’s a language they’re likely to be somewhat fluent in. Does it convey the message?
Then there’s the other sense of mirroring, too: so much of this is about reciprocity. You can match and reply to gestures and signals with gestures and signals of your own, get a nonverbal conversation going.
I’m making this sound more mechanical than it actually is. It’s really just becoming comfortable letting your body language express what you feel and realizing that that is communicating. One of my current partners says she thinks I do a lot of things I’m not even fully aware of myself. She’s probably right.
Meanwhile, on the verbal level, there’s a whole world of complicated embedded meanings to play with, ranging from double entendres and hints to more challenging insinuendos and queries and inquisitives, all of which can be non-overt expressions. (I don’t tend to start interactions on this frequency because there’s too great an opportunity for being a non-overt creepy jerk, but I stand prepared to receive and respond). Not all of what gets conveyed is arrayed directly around “do you wanna?”; in my experience a lot of women begin investigating on the verbal level to find out “am I correct in interpreting what’s going on here?”, often with a statement or comment that’s open to multiple possible interpretations of its own, and to which you can reply with something that can be taken as a confirmation or as an “au contraire”.
And this works? Well, here’s what tends to happen, and I am of course limited to my own subjectivities as well as my own attractiveness and other such factors, so anyone else’s mileage may vary considerably…
Firstly, there’s a whole lot of non-reaction. And we’re treating non-reaction as a “no thank you” here (“the ball is in her court and it’s her serve”) so it’s fair and reasonable to believe a lot of that non-reaction is indeed a “no” reaction and not just a “no reaction”. Some of it is probably cluelessness though. I’ve heard lesbian women telling other lesbian women “Hey she was hitting on you” and the person being told indicating “I had no idea”, so it’s reasonable that it happens in this circumstance as well. Add to that the likelihood that women don’t encounter a lot of males exhibiting these behaviors, and hence not necessarily being tuned in to the possibility and you’ve got a case for some of it being “had no idea you thought you were sending signals”.
Secondly, when there is a reaction, it may take many forms, and the communication proceeds from there, but where it proceeds to will vary all over the map. Some of the insinuations and inquisitives will be “am I correct in assessing you to be a gay guy?” and these will often be virtually indistinguishable from “so I gather you consider yourself to be one of us girlish people?” so you get the opportunity to play with ambivalence and finding ways of hinting “yes but no” or “mm, not quite” and other subtexts. The important thing there is whether there’s amusement and interest and curiosity.
Some is going to contain exasperation or confusion: “Oh seriously?” or “I don’t know how to respond to this” or “You’ve got to be kidding”, hinted at or expressed in various ways. Again, it’s all about whether you can evoke enough curiosity and fascination or if it’s just annoyance. Backing off can provoke more pokes and questions or it can simply constitute backing way, and is often the best test.
Mirroring can allow proximity and touch, and then the dance involves physical contact and the continuation of the signals dance. Or interaction can extend forward with invitations and future occasions and continuations of the process without having established what you’ve got established.
Basically if you get a nibble, you’re in teasing territory. Will we, won’t we, do we, don’t we. It’s a lot of fun for its own sake and when it’s stirred into enough of your interactions with enough people in your life, well, sometimes it does, and you do.
As often as not, conversation eventually goes into gender itself. Some of the hinting around and probing may give rise to a direct discussion of men and women and different behaviors and dating and courting and all that and the next thing you know it’s all out in the open. A great many women find the barrel of expectations and assumptions and interpretations that they have to deal with tiresome and frustrating and if they find they’re with someone who has bailed on the conventional model and is trying to go at it differently, that can open the floor for both of you sharing your experiences and talking about your feelings very honestly, and it can be really nice when that happens.
THIS WOULDN’T CUT IT AS A GUIDE TO HOW TO PICK UP GIRLS
It’s not a recipe that I’d anticipate would constitute good advice for everyone. I mean, for me, any attempt to try to follow the conventional advice about how male folks should behave to express interest in attractive women just resulted in frustration and failure; not only did I not do it well, but I did it with annoyance and resentment and that means on some level I wasn’t actually doing what works for a lot of guys, I was instead doing something different. My experience is limited to my experience (talk about your axiomatic truisms!) but my guess is that anyone who is male who is comfortably able to make use of the advice that others have given, advice that is more generically “out there and available” for guys, should make use of it because it’s more likely to be successful. You should walk on that side of the road if you can, because things are a lot more sparse over here.
But if you’re over here, this kind of approach does work. I’m shy about being this specific and explicit because I don’t consider myself phenomenally successful with it or anything, but on the other hand it’s not like the shelves are lined with other offerings along these lines.
GENDER INVERSION
This is the area of life where it was not sufficient to have a “yeah, so??” attitude about not being a gender conformist.
Ever since I came out in 1980, there have always been people saying “Yeesh, just be who you are. The rest of us aren’t going around being slaves to our gender role and conforming to rigid outdated sexist expectations! But we don’t find it necessary to go around telling people we’re ‘male women’ (or ‘female men’). You have a really rigid attitude yourself, you think that because you aren’t a Marlboro man with a deep bass voice who likes to watch football, that means you aren’t a ‘real man’ …”
Of course that’s exactly what my own attitude was for years and years: Yeah, I’m more like girls than I am like other boys, so what? What’s it to you? People don’t all have to be the same. There’s nothing wrong with it and I sure as hell don’t need your permission, so go stick it in a pencil sharpener and crank on it.
But the dating and courting and flirting thing made everything different. It made it matter. My dismissive attitude about gender expectations had not worked and I was left out in the cold. I didn’t have the right personality to be a charming sexually pushy initiator but just trying to be friends with girls and hoping something “would eventually just happen” hadn’t borne any results either.
And no one had ever taught me how to flirt.
So instead of merely finding gender expectations annoying and confining, and rejecting their limitations, I found a need to have others recognize me and understand my own array of sexual interest and feelings.
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AHunter3 blogs weekly on the subject of being genderqueer, gender politics issues in general, and his ongoing attempts to get his book published. These blog posts tend to be anywhere from 500 to 2500 words in length and are written in the style of a regular column in a periodical.
The reposting of these blog posts has been cleared with the moderators in advance.
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** To speak of it, as I’m doing here, also invites additional opportunities to feel clownish and ridiculous: perhaps a barrage of men will chime in to say “That’s what every man does, we all learn this, what makes you think you’re doing anything unusual or different?” All I can say is, if all guys learn this and do this, there sure is an odd dearth of anyone talking about it!
